The 2012 Story

to Dr. Hoopes privately. ²⁵ If Wikipedia is the arbiter of reality in any sense, then Hoopes has been successful at co-opting and inverting the term “Mayanism.” The endeavor is laudable, but the choice of terminology is misleading and unfortunate.

Hoopes spends a great deal of time moderating many different discussions on the 2012 Tribe website. His interest in 2012 lies not with the possibility of reconstructing authentic beliefs connected with it in the Maya tradition—I doubt he believes there is anything to be found there—but rather he wants to track the 2012 meme as it is interpreted through the filter of pop culture. Thus his interest in “Mayanism” and how such a thing, as he defines it, is manifested in my work, Arguelles’s books, Calleman’s ideas, and particularly in the recent book by Daniel Pinchbeck.

This arena can be fascinating, and Hoopes has uncovered a very early reference to 2012 in a parody newspaper published by beat writer William Burroughs in 1967.²⁶ Hoopes also has pointed out that the very first connection between the end of the 13-Baktun cycle of the Long Count and an interpretation of cataclysm appears in Michael Coe’s 1966 book The Maya. He sometimes slides into conflating my work with the nonsense that floods the marketplace, and I always take him to task for it, clarifying what my primary intentions really are. He seems to have reserved a special category for me—a kind of holding pattern until further notice. The term “syncretism” appears in his Wikipedia entry, but it is used in a way inconsistent with how syncretism has actually occurred in Mesoamerica. He sees it as a blending of two different worldviews, altering the essence of each forever. My comments to him are as follows:

I believe the term syncretism should be clarified. The connotation currently being utilized is that syncretism is a problematic blending and dilution of Maya tradition in its encounter with foreign elements. However, ethnographers have observed that syncretism largely functions on the surface level of detail—the costume worn by rites, beliefs, principles, and tradition. Christianity, for example, is a thin veneer under which the core tradition is alive and well. It is this core tradition, stripped of superficial surface changes, that I believe should be what “Mayanism” refers to. That’s how I intended it when I first used it in 2001.

In addition, “Mayanism” as it is being defined and used in the evolving Wikipedia entry observes that the modern Maya are adapting to foreign (primarily “New Age”) influences and adopting new elements. However, this is what the Maya have always done when confronted with foreign influence, although, as stated above, such adaptations and transformations occur on the surface whereas the essential tradition is preserved. It is this essential thing, the core of the Maya tradition, that should draw our attention.

Furthermore, if the process resulting in this new thing called “Mayanism” is not really a new process at all, but is what the Maya have always done, we should steer clear of the investigation taking on pejorative connotations—serving as a categorical gathering place for what is perceived as irrational nonsense and so on. Finally, since 2012 is a major focus related to Mayanism as defined on Wikipedia, I observe that the scholarly analysis of 2012 has been focusing almost exclusively on the social phenomenon of 2012 (attention going to what various modern writers are saying and how the collective tends to think about it and respond to it), rather than the artifact itself as a viable topic of study (in terms of what function it served in the Maya calendar and cosmology).²⁷

Hoopes has explained to me that my work is often confused with that of Arguelles or Calleman because we’ve all been published by the same publisher. Or my work cannot be taken seriously because I frequently speak at venues that have a New Age flavor. This is understandable but unfortunate, and it doesn’t mean that my work can’t be assessed carefully on its own terms, as I’ve been very patient and persistent in placing it before the eyes of scholars. One feels one must issue a disclaimer, such as “my presence as a speaker at this venue does not mean that I endorse the beliefs of its organizers.” Hoopes’s complaint makes sense from his experience as an academician, in which only a cautiously narrow range of ideation is allowed. If I were to give a talk on “metaphysics,” it would have nothing to do with the unsophisticated stereotype of the term that he seems to believe it represents. Suffice it to say here that it has nothing to do with the self-help pop metaphysics that is associated with supernatural phenomena in the New Age marketplace.

In late 2008, Jan Irvin interviewed Dr. Hoopes on his thoughts about 2012.²⁸ Being aware of my own work on 2012, he then invited me to respond. So we ended up having a two-part debate with the potential of continuing. I had the advantage of being the second interview, able to respond to Hoopes’s points. But Hoopes was well aware of my theory and so could address my work with that prior knowledge at hand, so it was a pretty even field. Here are a few observations:

Dr. Hoopes addresses what he calls “the common myth that the Maya disappeared.” This choice of terminology betrays an attitude that myths are lies, which is confirmed when he later admits that myths may perhaps have some value as moral guidelines. But there was no consideration of the archetypal structure of myths that reveal deeper universal content, as Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Huston Smith have identified. A myth in Hoopes’s view, if it has any meaning at all, is merely in terms of ethical or moral guidance. He subscribes to the idea of discontinuity between the ancient Maya and the modern Maya. He says there were “two episodes when the knowledge was lost or changed,” referring to the Classic Maya collapse and the Conquest. In both cases, only the surface style of how culture was practiced was disrupted. The deep cultural traditions, which revolve around language, religion, and the 260-day sacred calendar, have been preserved up to the present.

Here we have a confusion of levels. The surface level is perceived by material archaeologists as the only real, empirical level that can be granted one’s attention. In the process called syncretism, the Maya adopted the surface details of European culture—seeming to adopt Christian gods, for example—but we’ve known for a long time that the old ways were preserved underneath. For some scholars, the concept of deeper currents reeks of the ambiguous and unprovable. This distinction between surface and depth again speaks to the original use of the term “Mayanism”—pan-Mayan ideas that we may call archetypal, shared, or universal. One of these, for example, would be the idea that sacrifice is necessary at the end of a cycle to facilitate a successful transformation of the old into the new. It’s a universal idea that you find throughout Maya history and different groups. In fact, it’s one of those universal ideas that you find at the root of virtually all of the world’s religious traditions.

Dr. Hoopes claimed that The Popol Vuh is an early-eighteenth-century document contaminated by Christian ideas. This does not appear to be the case, as The Popol Vuh’s translator himself, Francisco Ximenez, stated that his intention was to preserve the original sense as precisely as possible (see Chapter 1). He also made a complete transcription of the original documented from the 1550s, and recent translators such as Dennis Tedlock have been able to identify likely typos, but by all appearances it is an accurate copy. The infrequent addition of Christian elements does not affect the overall structure of the doctrine of World Ages in the Creation Mythology section. My assertion that The Popol Vuh expresses a World Age doctrine was the nub of my point, leading to our debate, which Hoopes tried to mitigate with his various criticisms. But we can see that they were deflections away from the core fact: The Popol Vuh preserves a pre-Conquest World Age doctrine of time. We shouldn’t suspect that this was introduced by Franciscan scribes and translators, since Christianity abides by a linear history that ends in the Apocalypse and the Second Coming. Yes, these are doctrines, Articles of Faith, with capital letters.

It was important that Dr. Hoopes, in his interview with Jan Irvin, identified the earliest source for the idea that 2012 is about a cataclysmic event. It didn’t come from Arguelles, McKenna, or Waters. It came from Maya scholar Michael Coe, writing in his 1966 book The Maya: “There is a suggestion that each of these [time periods] measured thirteen Baktuns, or something less than 5,200 years, and that Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final day of the thirteenth.”²⁹ The use of Christian terminology to describe Maya eschatology is quite surprising. “Our present universe,” he continues, is “to be annihilated … when the Great Cycle of the Long Count reaches completion.”³⁰ This is the kind of language that Maya scholars today find so offensive, and rightly so. As I’ve been saying for two decades, the Maya Creation Myth itself does not espouse an idea of a final cataclysmic end to the universe. In a cyclic time philosophy, it’s all about transformation and renewal.

ASTRONOMERS AND THE GALACTIC ALIGNMENT